Listening to Billie by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

was vividly hallucinating the presentation of herself. And they continued; they decided that something must be done about her heart. In the ensuing debate, Dr. Branner won out over Dr. Stern. Gilbert was going to cut into and open up her heart. (Gilbert!)
    Of course they were not talking about Eliza. They were looking at some X-rays, illuminated on a large screen next to the lectern. “Some calcification, possible shunting, a clear mitral.”
    Dizzily, Eliza decided to attend fully to the next case, a two-year-old boy with Down’s Syndrome—which, on the way out, Kathleen explained fully to her: a Mongoloid, he will die anyway; they won’t operate.
    Eliza more or less took in what Kathleen said, but she still felt agitated, uncertain and upset. In the increasing, powerful heat, as the day moved toward noon, she and Kathleen slowly crossed the street to the research building, where their office was. A block farther on there was an open grassy park, raised up from the street, where a dark young man, bearded and in shirt sleeves, was sitting at ease in the sun. Eliza imagined running down to him and saying—saying what? Inviting?
    Dr. Branner and his retinue of surgeons hurried past the two young women. Passing, their white lab coats were stiff and resistant to the heat. Dr. Branner’s fine white hair was all in place—all beautiful.
    Just then Eliza came to an understanding with herself. She recognized that she did not want an “affair” with Gilbert Branner, an exploitive married man; she had been through that already with The Consul. She wanted to go to bed with Branner once, and not again. A one-night or one-afternoon stand. She smiled, thinking that such an impulse was supposed to be aman’s prerogative. And she considered a further, corollary fact about men: they do not like to be dropped after one encounter; they like it even less than women do. Once Eliza had done this—to, of all people, an Iranian banker, partly under a misapprehension that he was leaving the next day for Switzerland, for good. The next day he telephoned, not going to Switzerland, after all, and was furious at her refusal to see him again. (This helped to confirm his view that all American women were whores, and the following year he married a distant cousin, a decent Persian girl.)
    “Why are you smiling?” Kathleen asked. They had entered the research building and started down the hall.
    “No real reason.” And then Eliza asked, “Kathleen, have you ever thought about going to med school?” As she asked this, it struck her as incredible that she had not asked before—of course, that was what Kathleen should do.
    Striding ahead of Eliza, Kathleen had just opened the door. Miriam raised her head from her arms, which were crossed on the desk. To Eliza, Miriam looked as though she had something to say, but Kathleen had begun to shout.
    “Have I ever thought about going to med school? Lord, don’t you know the first thing? How much it costs and how hard it is to get in, especially for women? And I’d have to go back to college and get more science credits. Can’t you just see me in the chem lab at William and Mary, with all those darling coeds in cashmere and pearls and loafers? Eliza, you don’t
think.
”
    Miriam was indeed trying to say something, but Kathleen was still focused on Eliza. “Besides,” she went on, “I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t even want to work. I want to be a wife, like everyone else, and have some kids. Just because you’ve already got a kid, Eliza—”
    Miriam got out, “Lawry—”
    Those syllables reached Kathleen. She turned on Miriam and shouted, “
What?
”
    Slowly, Miriam smiled (beautifully); she said, “He call.”
    “You black bitch!” But that was affectionate; Kathleen could only have said it in a mood of great warmth toward Miriam. “What did he say?”
    “He say he at some place—The Lion’s Share?”
    “Lord, that’s in San Anselmo. He played there for a while. Oh,